Every successful SalesMaker I have ever known has built a substantial contact database.  It is protected and kept away from the eyes of peers, bosses and company executives with a passion.

What used to be found in a Rolodex is now housed in LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Outlook and/or your favored sales CRM tool. Wherever it is housed, those contacts are usually the most prized asset of a SalesMaker.  People are recruited and hired because of them, legal battles over non-compete agreements are fought over them, and they always hold promise for future business. These contacts are most  often customers, but also contain business partners, manufacturers, fellow employees and even competitors.

I have been exploring an intriguing new Web Tool that combines the many advantages of social networking and the contacts that you have accumulated. MyWay Interactive has announced the availability of Reach, a social network for sales professionals and small business owners. Reach provides live secure connections between salespeople for the trading of qualified leads.  Reach provides a secure platform to “trade” leads  with other sales professionals that are in a non-competitive or complimentary role.

Using Reach, salespeople and small business owners are able to immediately generate greater sales revenues and expand their number of qualified leads while building collaboration networks with other sales and business professionals.  Sales people can now conduct business at new levels of productivity using the collective account knowledge of thousands of sales peers.

Here is a brief overview of how MyWay Interactive’s Reach works:

1. You have contacts within companies.
2. You would like to obtain new contacts within your target prospects and current customers. 
3. There are many other non-competitive or complimentary SalesMakers engaged within the same account from other companies.
4. There are manufacturer reps engaged within the same accounts.
5. You can search the database for a contact within a specific company.
6. The name and contact information is NOT provided at this point
7. You initiate a trade of contact information with the owner of that contact for a contact that you have that they would like.

Examples:  If you are selling copiers into Company X, others are selling Computers, office supplies, recruiting services, and numerous other advisory services to them at the same time.  There are manufacturer reps from most of the major companies calling on the same company.  Would it be beneficial for all to share contacts with each other?  You are not competing with each other.  In many scenarios you are not even crossing paths.  How about the ability to create a private “network” of these same people to collaborate?

Another scenario that holds great promise is for a very large, multi-divisional sales organization.  The company will have various sales teams for printers, computers, servers, infrastructure, storage, software, services, leasing and even recycling.  How useful would it be to share information and contacts effortlessly with each other?

Reach is a hosted,  free service that includes:

• Personal web based contact manager
• Sales trading partner locator
• Exchange engine for anonymous trading
• Secure network for information exchange
• Easy integration of your LinkedIn contacts
• Fast, responsive customer support if you have a question

You can create an account easily by visiting MyWay Interactive and signing up for the free Beta account.

Create your account, load some of your contacts, search for some of your desired contacts and trade contacts with others.  Let me know what you think of the experience.